Opera in the Countryside

By Lawrence Malkin

One of the most unlikely settings in the world of opera is a Tudor mansion deep in the English countryside. For more than 40 summers the Glyndebourne Festival has set its own particular standards of impeccable musicianship and demanding dramatic style, displayed in its tiny (795-seat) opera house, like a masque in a princeling's private theater. The current season opened this month with a production of Verdi's Falstaff scaled to human size; Glyndebourne proves to be the perfect setting for the limpid musical economies of the composer's final opera.

American Bass Baritone Donald Gramm is an example of Glyndebourne's inspired casting as Falstaff. He acknowledges that his voice lacks Verdi's special melodic tessitura. But its dramatic subtleties and Gramm's own worldly manner answer Producer Jean-Pierre Ponelle's demand for a Falstaff who is "no gross giant" and fits into the rumbustious Elizabethan world he recreates. Gramm is light on his feet and a magical actor as he spins out recollections of his pageboy youth (Quand' ero paggio) and summons up what seems impossible but makes the character human: the memory of Falstaff as a child. He is no opera buffoon, but a laughing knight whether on top of the world or crushed by it. As Ponelle says: "Don't forget that Falstaff is an aristocrat."

Mozart's Standards. So is Glyndebourne. Founded in 1934 by John Christie, a wealthy country gentleman, as a diversion for his opera-singing wife Audrey Mildmay, it is now run by Son George. He surveys the audience, in the obligatory evening dress to reinforce the sense of occasion, picnicking on the 640-acre estate's broad lawns during the long early-evening intermission. Smoked salmon, pate, cold chicken and white wine or champagne are the staple fare. No wonder second acts always seem better. Says Jonathan Miller, one of the festival's visiting producers: "There is a sense of incandescence on those long summer evenings for both audience and cast. You feel like Goethe in Weimar."

The perfection of the festival's venue obscures its contributions to opera. Standards decreed for Mozart by Glyndebourne's first conductor, Fritz Busch, sound inevitable today: original languages, a minimum of bel canto fireworks and intimate orchestration as Mozart scored it. Venetian operas now returning to the international repertory were first revived here only a decade ago under the direction of Musicologist Raymond Leppard. Glyndebourne's current showpieces are the neglected conversational operas of Richard Strauss, Capriccio and Intermezzo. They were staged for the lustrous Swedish Soprano Elisabeth Soderstrom under Administrator Moran Caplat's dictum of "hiring people we know and exploiting them at what they want to do." To succeed retiring Musical Director John Pritchard, Glyndebourne is bringing in Conductor Bernard Haitink. His crisp baton imparts a discipline to this year's production of Pelleas et Melisande that discloses unexpected shadings in Debussy's diaphanous music.

Back to Text. At Glyndebourne every production starts anew. "When they've already sung it a hundred times, they've really forgotten it. We give them the discipline of the printed page and go back to the text," says Chief Coach Martin Isepp. Even revivals receive up to six weeks' intensive rehearsal, followed by at least four weeks' performance in repertory, "so the role can develop," says Gramm. "Once you get the opportunity to do a role here, it always stays with you."

Singers rising in the firmament flock to Glyndebourne even though they earn one-third or less than they could elsewhere. Not everyone accepts its disciplines: one crowd-pulling diva locked herself into her room to learn the score and missed rehearsals; she has never been invited back. Teresa Berganza, Luciano Pavarotti and Frederica von Stade had roles at Glyndebourne early in their careers, and Peter Pears came out of the chorus. Calvin Simmons, a young black from Los Angeles, is conducting this year's revival of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, staged with brilliant characterization by the director of Britain's National Theater, Peter Hall.

Gramm picked Glyndebourne for his triumphant British debut last year as a deliciously satanic Nick Shadow in Stravinsky's Rake's Progress, a new production that reached into the pop world for its designer. Painter David Hockney did new sets, costumes, even wigs crosshatched with mock etching lines as pop comment on Hogarth's joky perspective. The visual motifs complement Stravinsky's neoclassical dissonances, themselves a wry comment on the festival staple of Mozart operas. The production, in repertory in alternate years, is quintessential Glyndebourne in its mixture of tradition and innovation.

Independent of government subsidy or meddling by civic opera committees, Chairman George Christie is free to take artistic chances because of Glyndebourne's loyal supporters. An appeal for $150,000 to close this year's deficit in the festival's $1.3 million budget overshot its target. The money will go toward mounting new productions and burnishing Glyndebourne's gemlike setting -Christie refuses to use it to join the "international rat race" for stars. Explains Pritchard: "The bel canto movement, for all its successes, has done terrible things to opera. It's brought out the public just to see how the singers do it. The audience doesn't come to hear the opera any more." At Glyndebourne, it does.

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